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Dreams of Doom Help Gamers Learn
Studies suggest dreaming and learning are intertwined.
Oct. 31, 2009— -- Sigmund Freud thought dreams were a window into our unfulfilled sexual desires. But the dreams of video game players suggest they have a more practical role: helping us to learn new skills.
"It really looks like if you're not dreaming about it, you're not getting better," says Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School, who carried out one of the video game studies.
The studies don't prove that dreaming about games makes players better. But they strongly suggest that dreaming and learning are intertwined.
That sleep can help with learning and memory is well established. What's more, the more people dream during the light sleep characterised by rapid eye movements (REM), the better they recall memories. But whether the specific content of dreams plays a role in this sleep-learning process wasn't clear.
To find out, Sidarta Ribeiro and André Pantoja of the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal in Brazil turned to the visceral, monster-filled, first-person shoot-'em-up game Doom.
Their team persuaded 22 volunteers – some Doom experts, some casual players, and mostly male – to spend two nights in their laboratory hooked up to an electroencephalograph (EEG), which measures the brain's electrical activity.
On the first night, the volunteers did not play any video games, but researchers woke them during REM sleep – the stage of sleep most associated with dreaming – and asked them to recall their dreams.
On the second night, volunteers played Doom for an hour just before bedtime. The next morning, Ribeiro's team roused the volunteers out of slumber and again catalogued their dreams. They also asked them to play Doom again.
To estimate the fraction of each person's dreams that were devoted to the video game, the researchers also asked volunteers to list things they associated with Doom and things they associated with the sleep lab in general.
Words like "blood", "monster", "chainsaw" and "shotgun" topped the Doom list, while the lab environment brought beds, pillows and electrodes to mind. Ribeiro's team then scoured the dream reports for these words to estimate the extent that the video game was intruding into the dreams.
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